Management By IT Crowd Bosses

Posted on July 9, 2009 by John Hunter

John Hunter's IT Crowd badge (Reynholm Industries)

The IT Crowd is a great BBC show on an IT support office in a large organization. The IT staff are knowledgeable and tired of dealing with foolish users of IT. And you wouldn’t want to watch for any customer support tips (though companies like United Airlines might do just that). Anyone involved in IT know Internet Explorer 6 is not an acceptable tool in this day and age. But some IT departments don’t let that stop them from forcing it on their users. Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

Yes, the corporate world is taking its sweet time upgrading from Microsoft’s eight-year-old Internet Explorer 6, a patently insecure web browser that lacks even a tabbed interface. Take, for example, the mobile and broadband giant Orange UK.

According to a support technician working in the company’s Bristol call centre – who requested anonymity for fear of losing his job – Orange UK still requires the use of IE6 in all its call centres, forbidding technicians from adopting Mozilla’s Firefox or any other browser of a newer vintage.

This technician tells us that about a quarter of the Bristol staff had moved to Firefox after growing increasingly frustrated with IE6’s inability to open multiple pages in the same window and overall sluggish performance. But a recent email from management informed call-centre reps that downloading Firefox was verboten and that they would be fined £250 if their PCs experienced problems and had to be rebuilt after running Firefox or any other application downloaded from the net.

Great management. Provide only an outdated and poor tool. Then threaten to fine employees that try to get a tool to allow themselves to do their job. Yes, it makes sense to setup rules for managing IT resources in a company but it is not acceptable to provide extremely outdated tools and then instead of fixing the problem when employees can’t stand your lousy service any longer you threaten to fine them. Wonderful. I guess you could call it the punishment-by-threat-demotivation-drive-in-fear management (for those that think Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards model is too light on the punishment part of management).

Related: Stop Demotivating Me! – Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Lean IT Systems – Not ERP – The Defect Black Market (another theory X IT management example) – Change Your Name
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Posted in IT, Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

United Breaks Guitars

Posted on July 7, 2009 by John Hunter

Unfortunately companies like United have created cultures where people take pride in doing their job poorly. And the continued long term customer hostility companies take shows no sign of letting up. My suggestion is to take Southwest or Jet Blue (or Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific).

Unfortunately sometimes you need to travel somewhere that no airline that cares about customer service flies. Then just hope somehow the broken system you must trust to get you someplace somehow doesn’t fail you too badly. Or you can follow the increasingly common trend and publicize the horrible service you were subjected to, in your blog or perhaps your own webcast.

Related: Airline Quality – CEO Flight Attendant – Japan Airlines CEO on CEO Pay – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – Incredibly Bad Customer Service from Discover Card

Posted in Customer focus, Management, webcast | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Posted on July 6, 2009 by John Hunter

The Trouble with Performance Reviews [the broken link was removed] by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Managers don’t like giving appraisals, and employees don’t like getting them. Perhaps they’re not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don’t work. But as my colleague and fellow Stanford professor Bob Sutton and I pointed out in our book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, belief and conventional wisdom often trump the facts. And when it comes to performance evaluations, companies ranging from HR consulting firms to providers of software that automate the process have a big stake in their continued use.

The most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don’t accurately assess performance. More than two decades ago research done by professor David Schoorman showed that whether or not the supervisor had hired or inherited her employees was a better predictor of evaluation results than actual job performance.
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Possibly the biggest issue, however, is that performance appraisals focus managers’ attention on precisely the wrong thing: individual people. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught a long time ago, company performance often results more from variations in systems than from the individuals doing the work. One of the reasons Toyota Motor has been so successful for decades—even as leaders have come and gone and the automobile market has changed—is that the fundamentals of the Toyota management system, which emphasizes quality, continuous improvement, and standardized tasks, provide the advantage. By focusing on the presumed deficiencies or strengths of people, individual performance reviews divert attention from the important task of eliminating the systemic causes, such as inferior technology, behind poor performance.

Another good article pointing out the harm of annual performance reviews. As I have said many times managers need to do better. See chapter 9 of the Leader’s Handbook and previous posts: Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame – Performance Without Appraisal

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Performance Appraisal, Respect, Systems thinking, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Computer Network Operations Center Failures

Posted on July 3, 2009 by John Hunter

Obviously many businesses are now dependent on computer Network Operations Centers (NOC). Some of these data centers can cause millions of dollars in lost sales each minute if they fail. So sound engineering, including off-site redundancy is critical. Authorize.net is a recent example of such a failure, Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging

Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours… That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites, it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.
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A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST (last night). A traffic reporter for KOMO News that operates out of Fisher Plaza tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system which fried the generators.

From what I can piece together it seems within about 5 hours services were back up, at least partially. NOC failures are not uncommon (either due to fire, power failure [including backup systems], government raids, software glitches [not exactly the same as a NOC failure but some can have the affect of essentially knocking off a NOC from providing the specific service desired]). Evaluating these risks must be part of management systems with significant NOC dependencies.

Authorize.net set up a Twitter account and within hours has 2,500 followers. I am not a huge fan of Twitter, it is nice but seems pretty limited to me. But this is an example of using it effectively. You can follow me on Twitter @curiouscat_com.

Related: Information Technology and Business Process Support – Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – Information Technology and Management – IT Operations as a Competitive Advantage – Undersea Cables Cut Again, Reducing India’s Capacity by 65%

Posted in Customer focus, Economics, IT, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged , , ,

Management Improvement Carnival #68

Posted on July 1, 2009 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival began in 2006 with the goal to provide links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management.

  • Reward: Creativity’s Forbidden Fruit by Matt May – “Kaizen does not attempt to light a fire under people. It lights the fire within them.”
  • Elegance and Encapsulation by Pete Abilla – “Encapsulation is an elegant and simple principle to ease the burden on your customer by subtracting or covering the unnecessary and adding the meaningful.”
  • Deming’s Theory of Knowledge by Marc Hersch – “Systems thinking comes down to developing methods and instincts for hearing the voice of the process, or if you will, the voice of the system. This is the opposite of the reduction that has become the common sense of by-the-numbers and just-the-facts thinking in Western enterprise.”
  • Virginia Mason’s CEO on Health Reform by Mark Graban – “The path to better quality and safety is the same as the path to reduced cost… Our system is so full of waste (non-value-added activities), need to systematically reduce and eliminate that waste”
  • Does good experimental design require changing only one factor at a time (OFAT)? by Mark J. Anderson – “Multifactor testing is far more effective for statistical power, screening efficiency and detection of interactions. Industrial experimenters are well-advised to forget their indoctrination in OFAT and make use of multifactorial designs.”
  • Getting More People Involved in Improvement by Lee Fried – “make sure that all leaders are getting out of the conference room and into the gemba to make sure that the appropriate checking and coaching activities are taking place.”
  • How clean is clean enough? by Ron Pereira – “In other words, the true purpose of this step is to clean to inspect.”
  • Seeking: Checklist for a Sense of Urgency by Jon Miller – “This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.”
  • Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair by John Hunter – “the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now. And that story is based on their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.”
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Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair

Posted on June 30, 2009 by John Hunter

Toyota has developed a thought-controlled wheelchair (along with Japanese government research institute, RIKEN, and Genesis Research Institute). Honda has also developed a system that allows a person to control a robot through thoughts. Both companies continue to invest in innovation and science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. In my opinion the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now. And that story is based on their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.

Yes Toyota can improve their performance, based on the last few years. Does management understand what they need to do? I think so. Does management understand that the system needs to be improved rather than the numbers on the spreadsheets of various managers have to be made better? I think so. Do I think most companies today, with bad results, understand the difference between bad numbers on spreadsheets that are used to judge various managers and a system that needs to be improved? No.

I do not believe the bad earnings for the last year for Toyota are indicative of a failed system. The results do show a weakness in the Toyota system that allowed them to perform this poorly during this credit crisis. The risk to Toyota’s future is that they become too focused on short term results, mistakenly thinking the problem to be fixed in the bad quarterly results recently. They need to focus on improving the system for the long term. And the recent experience likely shows some areas that need to be improved. But in no way do the fundamental tenants of the management system need to be changed. For many other companies today, changing fundamental aspects of their management is what is needed.

Related: Toyota as Homebuilder – Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – Toyota’s Partner Robot – NUMMI, and GM’s Failure to Manage Effectively – Toyota iUnit – Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company by William Hunter, 1986
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Posted in Creativity, Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Science, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Posted on June 29, 2009 by John Hunter

Nice talk on fear of looking foolish. The speakers discuss the idea that visibility is good. Don’t hide. Make everything visible and the benefit from many people’s ideas. The talk focuses on software development but is true for any work.

“criticism is not evil” – Very true. “At Google we are not allowed to submit code until there is code review.” At the bottom line they are repeating Deming’s ideas: improve the system – people are not the problem, bad systems are the problem. Iterate quickly.

Related: 10x Productivity Difference in Software Development – The Software Engineering Manager’s Lament – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology

Posted in Google, Psychology, Respect, Software Development, Systems thinking, Theory of Constraints, webcast | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google Innovates Again with Google Wave

Posted on June 25, 2009 by John Hunter

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. They are developing this as an open access project. The creative team is lead by the creators for Google Maps (brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen). A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. You really have to watch to understand what it is.

This is a long webcast (1 hour and 20 minutes) and likely will be best only for those interested in internet technology solutions. But it also provides useful insight into how Google is managing the creation of new tools. But the ideas are not explicit (the demo was meant to present the new product Google Wave, not explain the thought behind producing useful technology solutions), so you have to think about how what they are doing can apply in other situations.

For software developer readers they also highly recommended the Google Web Development Kit, which they used heavily on this project. They also have a very cool context sensitive spell checker that can highlight misspelled words that are another dictionary word but not right in the context used (about 44:30 in the webcast). And they discuss using Wave to manage bug tracking and manage information about dealing with bugs (@ 1 hour 4 min point).

Very cool stuff. The super easy blog interaction is great. And the user experience with notification and collaborative editing seems excellent. The playback feature to view changes seems good though that is still an area I worry about on heavily collaborative work. Hopefully they let you see like all change x person made, search changes…

Related: Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – Great Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices – Amazon Innovation

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Google, IT, Management, Process improvement, Software Development, webcast | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Top 10 Reasons Why Employees Leave in IT

Posted on June 23, 2009 by John Hunter

Some of the problems expressed in the post linked to are specific to IT, and some are more important in software development (where as I have said before employees have higher expectations of management than most employees do), but many have truth for many employees. A good manager can create an environment where these problems are eliminated or reduced.

Top 10 Reasons Why Employees Leave in IT

No prioritization on items therefore constant interruptions in projects are the norm leaving projects unfinished due to a shift to “yet another project or task unexpectedly”
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Boss doesn’t communicate things that affect the team or you as an individual and makes all decisions without your knowledge only you finding about it later through another source
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Managers who fail to promote the very people who deserve it rather than who is popular or who they like
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Bad co-workers who do not get stomped out (let go) and hurt the culture
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Teams work best when they collaborate and are allowed to question what the proposed process or standard is, not just following and doing what is told 100% of the time. If the process suggested or currently ongoing sucks, question it and expect your team to question it!
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Employee comes up with an idea and manager disregards it because “no I’ve always done it my way” even if it’s a 1999 way of doing things

Related: Helping Employees Improve – Information Technology and Business Process Support – Stop Demotivating Me! – The Manager FAQ – Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management – posts on managing people

Posted in IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Carnival #67

Posted on June 21, 2009 by John Hunter
  • Not Invented Here by Nicole Radziwill – “when a NIH culture is observed, perhaps the resources and opportunities that are available to a group or an organization that could use them are truly invisible.”
  • Re-th!nk[ing IT strategy] by David Anderson – “if something is not strategic and we are not good at it then we should outsource it and buy the service instead. If we are good or world class at something but it is not strategic then we should spin it out and sell that service to our competitors.”
  • Let’s Teach Our Kids about Standard Work by Bryan Lund – “If we are going to nip this standard work thing in the bud, we need to go back to formula and start teaching our kids two things, 1) how to think about processes and 2) how to instruct.”
  • It Might Be Bad Design If Instructions Are Required by Mark Graban – “Sure enough, there was a full page sheet of laminated instructions on the desk for operating the lights”
  • HR and Innovation “HR must work diligently to make sure that right systems are in place to attract, identify, and capture the best talent to drive innovation.”
  • Learning from Community Medical Care Successes by John hunter – “The only way to get as bad results as we do for the huge cost is to keep doing what we are doing”

Visit the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival home

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